Posted on 08/23/2007 7:38:04 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The truth behind Bush's mangling of Cold War history. The Soviet Union was in its final days of existence when I visited Vietnam in late December of 1991. The cold war was about to end forever with the collapse of one of the two adversaries that had kept it going for 40-odd years. A lot had changed in Vietnam, too, I discovered during my trip. The coziness between Moscow and Hanoi, once comrades within the Soviet bloc, had curdled into mutual hatred. Throughout the country, but especially in the North, the Vietnamese had come to despise the large resident Russian population for its cheap spending habits and arrogance. Visiting Americans, by contrast, were welcomed with smiles (“Russians with dollars,” we were called.) On the day I visited the old U.S. Embassy in Saigon—the where some of those iconic photos symbolizing American defeat were taken—I discovered government workmen removing a plaque that once commemorated the North’s victory over the “U.S. imperialists.” In the waning days of that epochal year, 1991, the propaganda against American involvement in Southeast Asia was suddenly no longer politically correct. Hanoi’s new message: Yankee Come Back (and bring your investment dollars). Today Vietnam remains nominally communist, but Hanoi knows it is an ideological relic surrounded by Asian capitalist tigers, all of them U.S. allies or dependents (one reason Vietnam was so eager to have Bush visit last November: it wants to be part of that club). The cold war dominoes did fall—but the opposite way.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
If by "forget" you mean "lie about", then yes, he did. :)
And...Did you forget to search? (and format??)
It hasn’t been posted before, and yes, I did search. What else did you mean? I can’t post the whole article, it has to be excerpted...
It worked for everybody except the 2-3 million murdered for not being communist. The truth is like garlic to a vampire or a Cross to a Lib.
Pray for W and Our Troops
“the dominoes did fall, but in the opposite way.”
another brilliant, insightful, intelligent, compassionate, all-knowing socialist brother re-writes history. (what’s three or four million dead, more or less.)
/sarcasm off/
INCREDIBLE!
He must be excluding all the Arab countries, and China from the "developed world" to even come close to such a self-hating statement.
Rush actually was on this yesterday...
these lefties helped kill millions of Indochinese peoples and they still deny it and paint it as a victory
however...some 60s radicals left all that after seeing how Ho’s minions really acted after ‘75
The first several pages of the most recommended comments are filled with anti-Bush, anti-war rhetoric--much from Americans.
A randomly picked comment from the first 5 pages using the 'READERS RECOMMENDED' filter:
" Added: Wednesday, 22 August, 2007, 17:57 GMT 18:57 UK How can anyone hear Bush's comparison of the real Vietnam War to his own VietRaq War and not be apoplectic with rage? Here is this ... this draft dodger! ... daring to reference a war he and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton all avoided, telling soldiers and their families that the war he started is just as pointless as the one he evaded, yet expecting those soldiers to DIE for his own deranged dreams of "a crusade" in the Middle East. Bush and Cheney MUST be impeached! Christian Shea, Hollywood, California, United States Recommended by 35 people "
it “worked” for
john kerry, jane fonda et al,
but it did not work for the rest of us.
Oh, come on. What’s a few million lives to further leftist goals...? Stalin and Mao make Pol Pot look like a piker by comparison, and the lefties loved them. They still do.
See my tagline...:)
It worked for the VC, the NVA, the Khmer Rouge, and the Pathet Lao.
The indochinese are still running away from the communists. I could take anyone who cares to know to a Florida trailer park where they have a busy underground railroad.
Chinese aid quickly grew from a trickle to a torrent. In 1965, aid included 18 aircraft, 4,439 guns or mortars, 220,000 small arms, over 10,000 sets of communications gear, seven naval vessels, and more. Shipments fell in 1966 but were still substantial: 3,362 artillery pieces, 141,000 rifles, 14 warships, and other items. More than 70 aircraft were delivered in 1967, the peak year for these weapons, along with the first Chinese-made tanks. During 1968, deliveries included more than 7,000 guns and about 220,000 small arms, along with 18 tanks. In 1969-70, a fallow period, Chinese supplies arrived at only a subsistence level.
But after the invasions of Cambodia and Laos, supply deliveries hit a new peak in 1971, with almost 8,000 guns, mortars, and rocket artillery launchers, 143,000 small arms, and 80 tanks. Armor deliveries remained substantial, peaking at 220 tanks in 1972 then falling off. The Chinese spigot became the foundation of the North Vietnamese army that became so important in 1972 and 1975. Given that Hanoi simultaneously received many aircraft and almost all its air defense missile and radar systems from the Soviet Union, the combination was potent.
July 1989, South China Sea aboard the USS Ranger. I was a midshipman on a summer training cruise standing watch with my "mentor" who was the JOOD. The weather was really bad, only the helos were up, and one reported a small vessel in distress a few miles away.
The vessel turned out to be a motorized barge operated by the Vietnamese Army. It had lost its motor and had been blown out to sea in the storm. It was taking on water and the crew of 9 were about to abandon ship. Prior to their problems starting they had captured 20+ boat people who they had chained in the hold. Those boat people would have sunk with the barge if we hadn't shown up. Of the 9 military on the barge, all but 1 wanted to defect. Instead of drowning in the hold of that barge, the boat people were pulled out of the hold one by one and put into one of Ranger's motor whale boats. The first thing they saw coming out of that hold was an American aircraft carrier flying the Stars and Stripes. They were some very happy people.
I learned a couple lessons that day.
1. Communists won't hesitate to murder the masses if it satisfies their goals.
2. Sometimes the best missions in the military are about helping people.
3. You can take the biggest toughest looking sailor in Navy, after being on deployment for 5 months, put a tiny baby (in this case a cute little Vietnamese boy) in his arms, and make that sailor cry.
4. I knew right then I joined the right team.
By the way, the author of this article is full of $H!T.
Chinese aid was paid for by the Soviets. It would be hard to find aid that wasn’t.
“...Did he forget the millions killed in Vietnam and Cambodia after the United States left?”
No, He just shined ‘em on. It wasn’t convenient for his story.
On the question of ground forces, on April 17, 1965, the PLA Central Military Command ordered preparations to send troops to North Vietnam. Discussions with General Giap a few days later set the schedule. In late May the Chinese government adopted its policy for troops in the DRV, creating a seven-member committee to oversee the effort. One 20,000-man PLA unit deployed very quickly, in June, to build coast defenses and help in the defense of the northeast quadrant of the DRV coast. That unit contained an artillery regiment and another of antiaircraft troops alongside its engineer regiments. Even the engineer units had attached artillery, antiaircraft, and mortar elements. Two more composite divisions of railroad, engineer, and antiaircraft units followed.
The North Vietnamese asked for a pair of antiaircraft artillery divisions to bolster their air defenses in the Red River Delta and around Hanoi, but Beijing confined itself to the original program. As a result of appeals from Ho Chi Minh to Mao, the Chinese approved a second group of construction forces to help build roads in northern Tonkin, on the understanding that Hanoi would use its own labor and engineer assets to increase the pace of construction efforts in the southern DRV and on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The groups of PLA forces included nine divisions and numbered some 170,000 troops.
Zhang notes another account that in March 1969 there were parts of 16 PLA divisions (63 regiments), totaling 150,000 troops, serving on six-to-eight-month rotations. Chinese accounts record that some 320,000 PLA soldiers served in North Vietnam, of whom 1,100 were killed and 4,300 wounded.
Well, they certainly paid in blood of their own...
Yeah...I read it here earlier today. The Search I understand doesn’t always work great.
Yes he is.
I knew a guy who spent 12 days alone on the South China Sea in a small open boat, avoiding pirates and trying to drink his own piss.
After spending eight years in prison (he was a former officer in the RVN Navy) he escaped from his jungle prison made his way to the coast and stole a boat.
As he told me this, he got a very odd look in his eyes, looked at me and said “It seems like a dream, the things I went through. What I went through. I cannot believe it happened sometimes.”
Define “worked”
Jugheads who regurgitate revisionist “history” for their DNC masters make me want to hurl. This bozo Hirsh hasn’t got a clue.
I saw this same article earlier today on FR. That is all. I am not trying to be mean.
Hear,hear!
7 million dead is ok? What can you expect from snoozeweek?
The author's attempt to come off as centrist (or perhaps center-left--but certainly nothing more radical than that) is exposed for the fraud it is with the above observation.
Whereas the "war on terror" would be better renamed "the war on Islamist radicalism" or "the war on Islamofascism"--after all, terror is a mere tactic, not an accurate description of the enemy--the underlying concept is certainly sound. Those who would denigrate it as a mere sham, "ginned up to justify [President Bush's] invasion of Iraq," reveal themselves for the shallow thinkers that they are.
Especially when they speak of a "handful of Afghanistan-based bad guys," as though this were the full extent of our Islamist enemies.
Not with this title, since I searched this one...
FMCDH(BITS)
Hirsh's childish jabs at Bush with the "missing Politics 101 while at Yale" are always the sure sign of the avoidance of facts, replaced by a plethora of revisionist imagery.
There was so much in this piece that was sheer dishonest bravado but I have to agree that the above quote is the most patently dishonest paragraph of all for the very reasons you laid out.
While I know that Newsweek is pretty leftist, when I saw the headline I thought for sure it would be Kos or MoveOn, or DU. Expect Newsweek to only veer further left for the next election cycle and beyond.
One other thing. This guy writes a whole column to criticize Bush’s recent speech and yet there are no quotes from it that I saw except for the word “harsh.” Therefore this whole article is a refutation of Bush’s term “harsh” as being out of synch with history while avoiding the term “boat people” or “killing fields” or even Cambodia or Laos.
This is by far one of the most dishonest pieces of opinion that I have ever seen.
bfl
review
Don’t look now but DakotaRed posted it again on 08/24/2007 1:24:55 AM. Sometimes though freepers may have missed the earlier thread and do see the new one.
Great story.
Those hundreds of thousands of dead are irrelevant. It was long ago, and they weren’t even white folks. Our leftists couldn’t care less. What they do care about is how welcome we are nor -”Yankee Come Back (and bring your investment dollars).”
There is no more value in attempting to communicate or debate with folk who hold the views of the author than there would be to discussing dinner menus with dedicated a fecal phage.
They are lost. Non recoverable.
Didn't intend for the post to be so wide. Apparently the pre feature does wrap the words.
Hopefully, those people are not reflective of the nation as a whole.
Some of those posters occasionally type rational posts, so such a thorough amount of anger against Bush and the conflict is alarming and surprising.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.